It's the life cycle of a user-intensive website. This is how it normally goes:
- Small Beginnings. The website pops up as a result of the ingenuity of the human race- how inspiring. Google started as a college side-job.
- Attention. As the website obtains new users (whether it be in Beta Invitation or not), news sources and blogs start noticing. This happened very fast for Twitter thanks to websites like Mashable.
- More Attention. Now, not just websites are taking in the fresh breeze, but now a few brand names and celebrities are getting into the hubub. There may even be a mention of the website in a TV show or movie (there must be a hundred songs with/about MySpace).
- Semi-World Domination. As a result of the mainstream media framing the website in immortality, John Doe took notice, and now he wants in on all the fun. At this point there may be over 200 million people wanting in. Then comes...
- Total World Domination! At this point, the website is a full-on cooperation. Now the CEO gets to sit down and watch the money flow in. From here, they'll either start buying smaller companies or attempting to eliminate them through their own service. Google is a prime example with Gmail, Maps, Reader, Blogger, and Shopping. Yahoo! even more so, but I'm not about to type up a list of about 95 services. It is at this point that the corporation may be looked down upon as evil
- The Decline. Now, problems that have been budding since stage 3-4 are full-blown flowers about to explode with pollen all over your shiny new car. Now, 97% of the time, the explosion in site traffic causes minorities and stereotypically strange people to join the website. On MySpace, this is the emos, pedophiles, and ghetto people with little-to-no grammar and typing abilities. I will guarantee this will happen to Facebook sometime next year, and in 2 years for Twitter (it hasn't gone full mainstream yet). So for those that think "man, Facebook is infinitely better than MySpace," prepare to be horrified once you start seeing emo MySpace pictures (see blog post photo) popping up on people's profiles.
...and here's some side-notes:
I don't believe this is going to happen to the blogging world. Blog posts take a long time to type up and require work to maintain, while the typical MySpace addict doesn't have the patience nor the work ethic. As you may notice, as the years go by, the world around us seems to slow down while people want things done fast. That's why we have email, text messaging, Google, YouTube, and now, Twitter.
Notice the patterns:
Before, people were happy listening to the radio. All of a sudden society demanded faster ways of hearing what they wanted, so in came the vynil disks. Then, they wanted to hear what they want on the go, so up came high quality transistor radios and decades later, the Walkman. But that wasn't enough, so in came the more widespread portable casette player and eventually, the all holy CD. Yet, there was still more to be left desired, so the mp3 player came into play. And nowadays, we're transitioning to portable media players like the iPod touch, where you can listen to music while you book a flight or find the nearest Chinese takeout place is.
People want things faster, smaller, newer, and revolutionary in one way or another. Facebook and Twitter are growing because of these factors.
Kinda derpessing how websites become notorious for certain things (like myspace pictures). I belive Twitter's form of this will be the strange usernames people give themselves (twitter.com/omgiluvdavidsomuch), and the constant posting of tweets (100+ per day).
I am highly concerned for modern civilization as it pertains to social media...
By the way, never trust someone with X's in their username. Never.
